NEWS ANALYSIS : Accord Could Preempt Fear of First Strike

The sweeping U.S.-Russian arms pact announced Tuesday is far more than just another after-the-fact acknowledgment that the Cold War is over. It means that, for the first time in a generation, neither Americans nor Russians will have reason to live in fear of a sudden, preemptive nuclear attack by the other.

The new agreement, which will leave each side with up to 3,500 strategic weapons, is a blueprint for defusing the nuclear balance of terror: Neither Washington nor Moscow will have enough offensive missiles left, as the 21st Century begins and the 20th Century ends, to attempt a disabling first strike against the other.

And, if carried out as President Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin sketched the terms Tuesday, the new agreement will be the catalyst for a fundamental change in U.S. national security strategy.

After such drastic reductions in numbers of missiles have been made--by early in the next century, Bush said--strategic nuclear weapons no longer will occupy their traditional place at the center of American defense planning.

Instead of driving an endlessly escalating arms race, he suggested, the missiles and bombs would be maintained primarily to counter the proliferating but less devastating threat posed by lesser nuclear powers.

Even a fistful of nuclear weapons in irresponsible hands could do horrible damage, of course, but Tuesday’s agreement moves the nuclear superpowers far down the road toward eliminating the danger of nuclear Armageddon.

Also, by cutting the size of the nuclear arsenals to low levels, the new arms agreement will fuel the search for the next generation of ideas on how American forces of all kinds should be structured and arrayed to meet the new threats emerging in the post-Cold War world.

The agreement will also have significant diplomatic consequences. As its economy and geopolitical ambitions have collapsed in recent years, the Soviet Union and then its principal successor, Russia, have seemed more and more like an underdeveloped country with an overdeveloped military Establishment--an Upper Volta with missiles, as it has been called.

“In the future, we’ll treat Russia the way we treat China--an important country but not as important as Japan or Germany,” predicted Michael Vlahos, a strategist at the Center for Naval Analysis, a private think tank with close ties to the Navy.

Equally important, as both Bush and Yeltsin pointed out in their remarks during the White House Rose Garden ceremony, the proposed pact demonstrates conclusively that the United States and Russia genuinely do trust each other now--this time without worrying so much about verification.

The accord is “expression and proof of the personal trust and confidence that has been established between the presidents,” Yeltsin said. “And these things have been achieved without deception, without anyone wishing to gain unilateral advantages.”

For the first time, Russia accepted the idea of a nuclear pact that did not require strict “parity”--implicitly, but gracefully, accepting its status as a secondary power. According to U.S. officials, Russia intends to trim its arsenal to 3,000 warheads, while acquiescing in the American desire to keep up to 500 more.

Both Bush and Yeltsin emphasized that the arms cuts, achieved with blinding speed in comparison with past disarmament moves by the superpowers, were attributable to the new, democratic character of post-Soviet Russia’s leadership. It took Yeltsin and Bush just five months to clinch the new agreement, whereas the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that Bush signed last summer in Moscow with then-Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev was 15 years in the making.

The agreement “testifies to the fact that democrats in America trust democrats in Russia,” said Yeltsin’s press secretary, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov.

The accord also serves well the domestic needs of each leader, both of whom now face great if differing problems at home. Bush gained a forum for reminding the American voter of his proudest boast as President, that he has made the world safer.

“From this summit we see a new horizon, a new world of peace and hope, a new world of cooperation and partnership between the American and Russian people,” Bush said in his official remarks at Tuesday’s White House welcoming ceremony. “Our hope is that this partnership will end forever the old antagonisms that kept our people apart, that kept the world in confrontation and conflict.”

Said Robert M. Teeter, Bush’s campaign chairman, before the pact was completed: “It works terrifically” for Bush’s reelection campaign.

“This is a very important set of issues that neither of these other guys”--challengers Ross Perot and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton--”have even gotten to the parking lot on.”

Yeltsin spectacularly bested Gorbachev at the former Soviet leader’s strongest game--deal-making with the West--and now can further cut back on Russia’s bloated military forces at a time when resources are being marshaled for the civilian economy.

According to Kostikov, Yeltsin warned Bush that Russia would need great amounts of foreign financial aid and technical assistance to dismantle the existing rockets, extract the radioactive plutonium they contain and possibly reprocess it for use as nuclear fuel.

For Yeltsin, however, the arms reductions carry a certain danger. Paying attention to domestic concerns, Yeltsin stressed that the missile cuts had been approved by his defense minister, army Gen. Pavel S. Grachev, in a bid to head off criticism from Kremlin brass worried about Russia’s fast dwindling strategic capabilities.

Kostikov said the leaders agreed that politicians from the formerly hostile superpowers might be proceeding too fast for their respective militaries and agreed to accelerate contacts between them.

Russia, which at first sought a common army for all member republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which groups 11 of the republics of the former Soviet Union in a loose alliance, began only weeks ago to build its own armed forces on the wreckage of what had been the Soviet military. It also must redefine its defense and security goals in a world in which its longtime chief adversary, the United States, is emerging as a key friendly power.

For Grachev’s staff, it is a confusing world indeed, since the Russians, who once commanded the world’s largest standing military force, lost their Eastern European allies without a shot, then saw the Soviet Union break up last December.

The result, Grachev has said, is that the Moscow Military District now stands on the very front line of Russia’s defense.

The main security challenge to Yeltsin’s Kremlin is perceived as coming from the borderlands that once were the fringe republics of the Soviet Union and which often contain large Russian ethnic colonies--impractical targets for a Kremlin-controlled ICBM.

Although Russia has concluded a mutual security pact with a number of former sister Soviet republics, predominantly in Central Asia, in other spots it has lost the border facilities that once monitored developments in countries such as Turkey, Iraq and Iran.